The viral personal AI assistant, formerly known as Clawdbot, has undergone its second rebrand in less than a month. The project has now officially adopted the name OpenClaw, after Anthropic’s legal challenge temporarily changed the name to “Moltbot.”
Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, who came back from retirement to develop the tool, admitted that the latest rebrand was a proactive decision.
“We hired someone to research the OpenClaw trademark and also obtained permission from OpenAI to ensure proper compliance,” Steinberger explained to TechCrunch. The project quickly gained popularity on GitHub. In fact, we earned over 100,000 stars in just two months!
The buzz surrounding OpenClaw led to the emergence of one of the strangest online niches: Moltbook, a social platform for AI assistants to communicate with each other. At Moltbook, autonomous agents exchange information on topics ranging from Android automation to webcam stream analysis.
This phenomenon has attracted the attention of industry leaders. Andrei Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI director, called it “truly the most amazing sci-fi-adjacent takeoff I’ve seen in a while.” Furthermore, British programmer Simon Willison described it as “the most interesting place on the internet right now”.
“If you can’t figure out how to run the command line, this is too dangerous a project to use safely,” wrote the top maintainer known as “Shadow” on the project’s Discord. “This is not a tool that should be used by the public at this time.”
To support the project’s transition from solo experimentation to a sustainable open source ecosystem, OpenClaw has launched a sponsorship model. There are tiers ranging from “Krill” ($5 per month) to “Poseidon” ($500 per month). Mr. Steinberger has promised not to keep the funds. Instead, we teach full-time maintainers to be paid to improve security and stability.
The project has already attracted support from prominent engineers. They include Path founder Dave Moerin and investor Ben Tossell, who see OpenClaw as an important step in putting powerful open source AI tools directly into the hands of users.
